Morgan is a three-year veteran of her school's rowing team. She spends her free time reading, doing logic problems, playing the guitar, and swimming. She plans to pursue a career in math or engineering because, she says, "truthfully, I am completely left-brained."
Because fossil fuels are in finite supply, Morgan investigated the energy value of five common plants—peanuts, sesame, sunflower, pumpkin, and kudzu. She reasoned that such energy sources would be renewable and that spilling them wouldn't pollute the Earth. Morgan hypothesized that peanuts would contain the most oil of the five, and that sunflower seeds would have the highest heat value.
Morgan ground up equal amounts of biomass from each of the five plants. She used dichloromethane as a solvent to extract the oil from each sample of biomass, which provided a measure of oil yield. Then, using a calorimeter, she measured the energy output of each kind of oil in kilojoules. Morgan found that sunflower and sesame seeds had the highest oil yield per gram of biomass and that all the oils derived from these plants had roughly similar heat value. Thus, sunflower and sesame seeds provided the highest overall heat value per gram of biomass, followed in order by peanut, pumpkin, and kudzu.
